Have lots of leads but few sales is classic ‘marketing friend zone’ territory. Assess your marketing engagement tactics to fix it.
The first place to look is your CTAs and sales process.
They probably need an overhaul, so put some time aside to review and make changes.
A good tip is to hire an outside firm or freelancer to do the review.
Sometimes it’s hard to spot what’s wrong because you’re so close to the product. An independent eye may cost more in the short term but what they can see that you can’t may prove invaluable.
How to review your sales funnel
Awareness stage
Are you up to date on your customer pain-points? Use tools like Ahref’s Keyword Generator to discover the search keywords your audience is using and craft new content e.g. top-1o lists and bitesize guides.
Be a fly on the wall! Try ‘social listening’ (exploring the chatter around your product domain) on Twitter to see what educators are really saying about their job, lives, and struggles. Identify common concerns and tackle them through webinars, blog posts, and social posts.
Consideration Stage
How can you benefit your target audience even more? Establish your credibility with a niche blog post series that showcases your expert insight.
Do you send a newsletter? Now might be the time to assess its impact. It sounds counter intuitive but try eliminating messaging about your company and service and talk exclusively about what matters to your prospects.
Decision Stage
Explain how your product and services will alleviate their issues. Use digital ads to promote webinars, training, or free trials.
Retarget fence sitters. Decision making in schools is complex. Which means it can take time to close a sale. Set up retargeting ads to push your messaging to people who showed interest.
Purchase Stage
Turn that customer into an advocate. Now you’ve closed the sale what other features, support, or memberships can you pitch to your customer to make their life easier (and therefore more likely to spread the word)?
Amp up your marketing tactics to stay out of the zone too…
- Comment threads that are “busy” get shared more by algorithms. Respond quickly to comments on your social posts to spark conversation. (Don’t copy and paste generic responses – make them nuanced.)
- Use the content in your posts and/or a question related to the content you’re pushing as a discussion point. (Alternatively, you can reserve the actual content links for your comments or DMs.)
- Tag social media users who have been engaging with your profile, such as likes, shares, retweets, and comments. Ask them questions or post polls about topics related to your brand.
- Utilise your blogs and lead magnets as conversation starters by posing a question to promote responses via the blog itself or on your social channels.
There’s a time and a place for friends, but it’s the ‘relationship zone’ where you want to be.
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